Opinion | The Meaning of the Super Bowl ‘He Gets Us’ Ad

During Super Bowl Sunday, a 60-second ad aired about Jesus Christ, and no one seemed angrier about it than Christians. The ad depicts a series of images of one person washing another person’s feet. Each pairing seems unlikely. An oil rig worker washes the feet of a climate activist. A cop washes the feet of a young Black man. An older woman washes the feet of a young woman outside an apparent abortion clinic, while anti-abortion protesters look on. A priest washes the feet of a young L.G.B.T.Q. man. As the commercial ends, words appear on the screen: “Jesus didn’t teach hate. He washed feet.”

The ad came from a group called He Gets Us, which is running a multimillion-dollar ad campaign with the aim of essentially reintroducing America to Jesus. Its website asks, “How did the story of a man who taught and practiced unconditional love become associated with hatred and oppression for so many people?” The constant theme of the group’s ads is that Jesus knows you and loves you.

But not everyone loves the ads. First, there’s the entirely fair question of whether it’s appropriate for Christians to spend large sums of money on an ad campaign when it could be spent instead on, for instance, providing food or shelter to those in need. I’ve had questions about that myself.

He Gets Us has also come under fire from the left. Some people have critiqued the funders (which include a founder of Hobby Lobby), noting that they’ve also funded conservative Christian legal causes. Americans United for Separation of Church and State goes so far as to call the ads “a front for Christian nationalism.”

Yet if that’s true, someone forgot to tell the religious right. The most radically right-wing Christians were furious at the ad, and they’ve stayed furious for days. The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh called the ads “heretical [expletive]” and said, “Putting out an ad that invites narcissistic, prideful, unrepentant sinners to come and get their feet washed is bad, actually.”

The critiques kept rolling in, and many were not gentle. A Christian writer named Samuel Sey highlighted the segment of the ad that depicts foot washing outside an abortion clinic. The “Christlike thing to do at an abortion center isn’t to wash an abortion-minded girl’s feet while ignoring their murderous intentions,” Sey wrote. “The Christlike thing to do is to call them to repentance.”

But all the right-wing anger at the ad may offer a hint as to its true target. Far from making a stealth case for Christian nationalism, the ads are making a rather blatant case to Christians that perhaps Jesus would not play the culture-warrior role they imagine. This is especially true of the Super Bowl ad, which refers to a story known primarily to Christians.

In John 13, Jesus humbled himself, washed his disciples’ feet and then instructed them, “You also should wash one another’s feet,” an admonition that many Christians take quite literally. Foot washing as a humbling act is a staple in countless churches.

The best explanation I’ve heard for the ad came from Kaitlyn Schiess, a Christian writer and speaker and frequent guest on the Holy Post podcast. She argued that the ad asks, “Are you willing to be shamed for your associations?” In other words, are you willing to risk shame and isolation for loving those on the other side of the political and religious aisle? Are you, like Jesus, willing to love others even if it causes people to hate you? Are you willing to love others even if they haven’t repented of what you believe to be grievous sins?

I grew up in a quite fundamentalist religious tradition, and my church placed an enormous emphasis on the “boldly declaring” model of Christian engagement. Under this model, Christians’ great gift to the world is the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and our fundamental job is to preach Christ to the lost. In other words, when we encountered the “other side,” our first emphasis was on our words, and our words emphasized repentance. That’s what irritates Walsh and Sey about the “He Gets Us” ads. Why don’t they call out and condemn sin?

When I left my fundamentalist church and joined an evangelical fellowship in law school, I learned a different approach. This model says that there is a difference between declaring your faith and demonstrating your faith and that declarations without demonstrations are worthless.

It’s one thing to possess the courage to say what you believe, but it takes immeasurably more courage to truly love people you’re often told to hate — even and especially if they don’t love you back. There is nothing distinctive about boldly declaring your beliefs. Many people do that. But how many people love their enemies?

That’s what the Super Bowl ad is communicating. It’s not saying there’s no difference between the cop and the young Black man or between the oil rig worker and the climate activist — or that they shouldn’t speak about their differences. It’s saying something far more radical and valuable: I can love you and serve you even when I disagree with you.

In fact, while Jesus was obviously a preacher and a teacher, Scripture is clear that when people were suffering or in peril, time and again Jesus moved to relieve their suffering before he asked them to follow him. He immediately demonstrated love and compassion when people were under duress. Kindness was not conditioned on first accepting his teaching.

That doesn’t mean Jesus stopped proclaiming his message, nor should Christians. But he was actually hated for the amount of time he spent with the despised and the marginalized. In Matthew 9, for example, the Pharisees angrily asked Jesus’s disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”

The older I get, the more I reject the “bold declaration” model of Christian engagement in favor of prioritizing courageous demonstration. Why should anyone listen to our declarations, anyway? How many “bold” pastors have been exposed as liars, frauds and abusers? How many of our “boldest” Christian leaders and institutions have been exposed as spectacularly corrupt?

Indeed, I’m so weary of Christian scandals that I’m now instantly wary in the presence of excessive “God talk.” Whenever people lead with their religiosity, I’m cautious. I’d rather know people’s faith by their virtues. And we know from Scripture which virtues demonstrate the presence of the Holy Spirit in a person’s life: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” How do you demonstrate those virtues? One key way is by overtly loving and serving those people with whom you have profound disagreements.

The irony here is that in a strange way, Americans United for Separation of Church and State and their actual Christian nationalist opponents are in substantial agreement. They see each other fundamentally as foes. But that’s not the universal model of Christian engagement. Yes, there were Christians who were offended by the ad. But there are millions of others, like me, who watched the ad and felt challenged. We asked ourselves if we were adequately loving and serving our neighbors.

I was reminded of a story that made an indelible impact on me. When I was a young law student and experiencing my first year outside my fundamentalist bubble, an evangelist and professor named Tony Campolo came to speak to our Christian fellowship. The story he told helped reframe my life.

Campolo was eating out very late in an all-night diner when a group of women who were obviously prostitutes came inside. One of the women, named Agnes, said her birthday was the next day and observed that she’d never had a birthday party in her life. Campolo overheard the conversation and asked a man behind the counter if the women came in every night. He said yes.

The next night, Campolo brought some simple decorations, hung them up and threw Agnes a surprise party in that diner. She cried tears of joy and ended up taking the cake home, untouched. It was the first birthday cake she had ever received. After she left, Campolo prayed with the people who remained in the diner, and one of the employees asked him what kind of church he belonged to.

Campolo’s answer was perfect: He said he belonged to the kind of church that gives a party for a prostitute at 3:30 a.m. Not, obviously, because he approved of prostitution. But because he cared for Agnes. He threw that party for her before he knew how she’d respond, before he knew whether she’d leave the streets and before he’d had a chance to say anything at all to her about Jesus. The party itself spoke to her more loudly than any words could have.

I still don’t know how I feel about spending so much money on a Super Bowl ad about Jesus. But I do know that its message is vitally important. Many of the “He Gets Us” ads show how Jesus shared our experiences and knows our suffering. But the Super Bowl ad did something different and more provocative. Instead of telling our nation, “He Gets Us,” it essentially asks American Christians, do we get him?